Many telephone users commonly receive phone calls at different telephone numbers including residential wire lines, business wire lines and mobile lines. Each of these telephone numbers is often served by some kind of answering or voice mail system such that when an incoming call is not answered the caller can leave a message. Many residential lines have answering machines for recording the messages within their home. Business lines and mobile devices are commonly served by electronic voice mail systems.
A person who can be contacted at all of these various phone numbers must access each voice mail service and answering machine separately to access their messages. Accessing these different systems can be time inefficient especially if there are no voice mail messages to be retrieved. Voice mail retrieval would be simplified if the user could be notified of and access voice mail messages at a single source even though the messages are stored at different locations.